LA Review of Books

Eric Newman speaks with Nicholas Boggs about his monumental new biography, "James Baldwin: A Love Story." Drawing on fresh archival research and interviews, Boggs offers an intimate portrait of the literary legend anchored by the romances that shaped his life, writing, and political vision. Spanning Baldwin’s formative mentorship under artist Beauford Delaney, his romance with Lucien Happersberger, and lesser-known relationships with Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and French artist Yoran Cazac, the book explores how these relationships, alongside periods of isolation, served as the engines of Baldwin's literary production. Arriving amid a renaissance of interest in Baldwin’s life and work, Boggs’ biography offers a fresh perspective on the iconic writer for longtime fans and younger generations who may be encountering him for the first time.

Kate Wolf speaks with Nathan Kernan about his new biography, "A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler." It’s an intimate look at the great poet who was born in 1923 and would become one of the original members of the so-called New York School along with John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and Barbra Guest. With the restraint, precision and wry humor of one of Schuyler’s own poems, Kernan’s biography delves into Schuyler’s tumultuous upbringing in the midwest and Washington DC, his early years in 1940s New York City where he became close with and worked as the secretary to the poet W.H. Auden, his fateful meeting of Ashbery and O’Hara, which led to the composition of his first poems, and his many struggles with mental illness. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for his collection, "The Morning of the Poem," Schuyler’s decades of instability began to ease only by his later years, but the lucid observation and “inspired utterance” of his work remained a constant throughout his life.

Eric Newman speaks with director Sam Feder and producer Amy Scholder about their new documentary "Heightened Scrutiny." The film follows ACLU attorney Chase Strangio’s journey to the Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti, which sought to overturn Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth. Alongside Strangio's work on the case, interviews with journalists, activists, and others reveal how media coverage of trans issues by publications including the New York Times have fueled legislative attacks against trans people as well as a burgeoning anti-trans cultural turn fed by disinformation. Feder and Scholder's documentary offers a sobering look at the current assault on trans rights.

Writer and scholar Michael Clune joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss his debut novel, "Pan." It captures the frenetic mind of a 15-year old boy named Nicholas as he undergoes his first panic attacks. Trapped in suburban Illinois in a time before the internet, Nicholas has little basis to understand what is happening to him. His search to understand his panic leads him to the condition’s namesake, the Greek god Pan, and a series of strange rituals Nicholas will go on to perform that involve him with a group of close friends. But the presence of Pan in the book also underscores an even more fateful aspect of Nicholas’s awakening: the connection between feeling, language, and literature, and anxiety as the catalyst for spirituality, insight, and criticism.

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by writer and professor Sebastian Castillo whose new novel "Fresh, Green Life" is the LARB Book Club pick for the summer. "Fresh, Green Life" follows a narrator, also named Sebastian Castillo, who has resolved to spend a year alone, exercising, watching self-improvement videos and thinking about how he has arrived at this particular point in his life: a lapsed adjunct philosophy professor, obsessed with a former classmate named Maria, but disconnected from everyone around him. Castillo discusses a certain type of lost literary man, the creation of art, and the why it may or may not all be worth it.

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak with writer Catherine Lacey, author of the novels "Biography of X," "Pew," "The Answers," and a short story collection, "Certain American States." Her most recent work is "The Möbius Book," which is split in two — one half is fiction and the other memoir. The novel tells the story of two friends, catching up on a grim Christmas Eve. The memoir is about Catherine herself, set adrift after a brutal breakup. Lacey discusses new beginnings, the formal experiment in the book, the connection between memory and storytelling.

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with Traci Thomas, host of the "The Stacks” podcast. They discuss the impact of social media on publishing, the content creator life, and the way readers discover books today. At the end of the episode, Medaya, Eric, and Traci offer readers a rundown of recommendations for the books getting us through 2025.

For Independence Day, we dive into the archives to bring you an episode that still feels timely. Ruth Wilson Gilmore joins Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to talk about her collection, "Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation," which covers three decades of her thinking about abolition, activism, scholarship, the carceral system, the political economy of racism, and much more. For Gilmore, these are not siloed issues; rather, they are braided effects of an unjust political, economic, and cultural system that must be dismantled in order for liberation to take place. Gilmore reminds us that we must look for connections beyond the academy, where theory meets praxis, where the vulnerable are not an abstraction but a concrete human reality. Her thought and work are a much needed shot in the arm for a political and intellectual culture that has, in the view of many, atrophied or been co-opted by the extractive loops of late capitalism.

Susan Choi joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about her new novel, "Flashlight." An epic story that spans multiple generations of a single family, the book is an astute exploration of identity, migration, memory, kinship and the irrepressibility of the past. It begins in the wake of the mysterious disappearance of a young academic named Serk. An ethnic Korean, who was raised in Japan and decided to continue his studies there when his family returned to Korea after WWII, Serk later moves to the US and marries Anne, who is also estranged from her family and has her own secrets. Their daughter, Louisa, is with her father on the night of his disappearance, from a beach back in Japan, where the family has come for Serk’s year-long academic appointment. Washing up on the shore in the morning, Louisa has little memory of what has taken place, and it will take her many decades, and the course of the novel, to discover the truth.

In this double episode celebrating pride month, Kate Wolf speaks with the critic Vince Aletti about his new book, "Physique," an assortment of hundreds of physique photos from Aletti’s own personal collection. The images in the book represent a time when homosexual life in the US was illegal, existed mostly underground, and was by necessity furtive and coded. Yet throughout the country there were photo studios producing erotic and often very beautiful photographs of barely clothed men, and distributing them through mail order catalogues and small magazines. Aletti revisits these images and their quiet revolution in his book; post-Stonewall physique photos may have appeared timid or kitsch but today they point to a largely unknown story and genre of imagery that is worthy of reconsideration as well as enjoyment. Then Milo Todd discusses his novel "The Lilac People" with Eric Newman. Set in the aftermath of World War II, "The Lilac People" follows three queer Holocaust survivors—Bertie, a trans man; his girlfriend, Sofie; and a young trans man named Karl—as they attempt to flee a hostile postwar Germany. As they evade Allied forces who are re-imprisoning queer and trans survivors, they must also navigate betrayal, suspicion, and the ongoing threat of violence from neighbors and hidden Nazis alike. Todd’s debut shines a light on a buried chapter of Holocaust history, one in which the queer and trans people, who were among the Reich's first victims, became victims anew after its fall.